Zoom and other forms of functional (and free) videoconferencing software aren’t necessarily better than meeting in person, but they’re also not necessarily worse. And although a company may demand that everybody return to the office at some point over the next few months, that doesn’t mean that their outside partners or clients will do so, making Zoom or a conference call an automatic part of every outward meeting.

I will acknowledge that this absolutely happened before the pandemic, and usually led to everyone sitting in a conference room around a speaker. Except we’ve now had a vivid experience of the alternative, and hardly anyone is clamoring to go back to the way things were, germs and all. For the past 19 months, we didn’t need to interrupt our workday to go to a special room so people could talk over one another and waste time. Meetings weren’t an event, but a to-do-list item that required a little more attention than an email. I suspect that those mourning the loss of pre-pandemic meetings are likely executives and managers who enjoyed the attention and the chance to prove themselves valuable through extremely visible performances. Whereas you might be able to “command a room” in person, it’s much harder to feel that everybody knows how great you are when you haven’t gathered them around a long table of which you happen to sit at the head.

Meetings were previously a novelty—a mutually agreed-upon way in which we could all use up one another’s time nonspecifically that was nevertheless accepted as “work.” Videoconferencing’s low barrier to entry has removed meetings from this vaunted status, making them just another means to get things done, along with email, Slack, and other productivity tools.